Cover

Dedication

For Mum,
who never once told me to get a proper job,
and for Dad,
I miss you and I hope this does you proud

sparks

The Firewatcher

1 pageviews—1 posts, last published
Tuesday, 13 September—0 followers

the firewatcher

It starts with the striking of a match: the thin, dry snap of red powder scratched on white. It is the sound of chemistry—of sulfur, phosphorus, and glass. It is a warm and gentle caress, a pair of thick, strong arms that take hold of you, envelop you, and tell you everything is going to be all right.

But you shouldn’t have come back. You know that now.

You should never have returned to this crumbling Victorian mansion, like something from a horror film, with its grand architecture and Gothic features. The rusted iron gates that lie discarded in the rhododendron bushes. The long, winding, weed-infested driveway. The house itself, squatting in faded glory, brick-blackened and scarred, windowpanes cracked and stained with milky cataracts.

The workmen unload their long pipes of scaffolding from the van, laughing and joking, questioning each other’s parentage and boasting of their sexual prowess. They lift their tools and cans of paint, and slip back into the gaping maw of the house, back to their great work of restoration.

These hired hands dig at your past, knocking down walls that were placed there for a reason; unearthing all the buried secrets. You can hear him now, just as before, and only now do you realize that he never really went away. He was there all that time, lying dormant, waiting to be found. Waiting for you to drop your guard. His voice grows louder as he surfaces, clawing his way up through your mind, echoing and barreling around inside your head. He looks out through your eyes . . . and then he screams.

You reach for another match, feel the warmth and the beauty and the comfort offered . . . but it’s over far too soon, the wood consumed from top to bottom in mere seconds, the flame drawn down into your empty hand, where it gutters and snuffs until there is only the cold and the damp and the dark.

The scream is louder now, and this time the match will not be enough.

This time the whole world will burn.

POSTED BY thefirewatcher AT 5:45 PM

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The man with the scar on his cheek looks down from the window of the apartment building and wonders if someone has thrown a blanket over Sheffield. Summer has swaddled the city in a haze reminiscent of the smogs of its industrial heritage. Sunlight is funneled through rows of terraced houses just as molten iron once sludged and pooled in the blast furnaces and steel mills of the Don Valley. It spills down from the hills and through the parks, weaving its way between the trunks of trees and out onto the ring road.